Apple Music updates its iCloud matching technology

Apple Music announced that it is incorporating acoustic fingerprinting into the platform in an update to its technology for accessing cloud-based music libraries. The streaming service had been using traditional metadata to match songs in a local library with the related iCloud Music Library. That caused some instances of confusion for listeners in cases where the metadata on a track was imperfect or incomplete. It also could cause issues with DRM protection if songs were re-downloaded to different devices.

Subscribers could pay for an iTunes Match subscription to get access to acoustic fingerprinting for their Apple Music libraries. That approach is more precise, since it relies on analyzing the music of the audio file rather than its tags. Now that the technology is being directly added to Apple Music’s iCloud matching, listeners may find fewer of those hiccups when accessing their libraries.